How To Set Up A Social Media Campaign In Six Steps

Erin Niimi Longhurst, September 5, 2017

You have a social media strategy in place, and you’re doing some social listening – but now it’s time to use social to meet your real-world goals. Whether it’s getting volunteers to your event, getting that petition signed or meeting your fundraising targets, your campaigns need to be set up properly in order for success.

At Lightful, we try to take on some of the legwork for you with our campaigns feature – but before you launch into anything, you need to think about these six things first. We touched base with Not My Style co-founder Alisha Miranda about their crowdfunding campaign, and what they learned throughout the process. Not My Style is an app that rates high-street stores on how much information they disclose about the men and women that make their clothes, to encourage consumers to make more informed decision about where they shop.

Team

We always like to say that teamwork makes the dream work. Social media shouldn’t be an afterthought but should reflect the entire organisation as a whole. Are your marketing and fundraising teams on the same page? How is your campaign going to sit within the larger marketing and communications strategy?

Who should sign off, or have input on your campaign? Assign point-people from relevant departments and teams, and try to schedule in advance times to check-in, give updates, and receive their feedback.

Plan, Audience, Goals

Who exactly are you trying to target with this campaign, and why? Set yourself KPIs ahead of time, and keep them realistic. While it would be great if you could increase followers, raise funds and get your petitions signed in the same campaign it’s not realistic.

Set short-term goals within your campaign for each channel, and general content ideas and features you’ll need to prepare and develop throughout the campaign. Clearly identifying your target audience is also incredibly important – keep this as specific as possible. While it’s tempting to appeal to as large a target audience group as possible, you want your campaign to be effective, and inspire the audience to take action.

“We did a lot of preparation in terms of engaging initial donors,” says Alisha. “We did a ‘soft launch’ before the real launch because we wanted to make sure that when donors who didn’t know us went on the site, they would see that other people had already given.”

They knew their target audience – young women who were interested in fashion, but who also wanted to shop ethically. The social media activity for the Not My Style crowdfunding campaign mostly took place on Facebook and Twitter, and the team created shareable assets – like a video and infographic – to get their campaign in front of those audiences.

“We had a tier A-list – bloggers that are interested in ethical fashion – we’ve probably got 40% of people we reached out to on that list to engage with us, which has been really good. For the much bigger list for people who are just interested in fashion in general, it’s been a smaller percentage, but it’s been so worth it. When you do get somebody really big to engage with you, it opens the door to a whole new set of people.”

Platform

Once you’ve identified your target audience, think about what platforms they are on and develop a strategy for each one. Are your images sized correctly for each one? Should you be doing a Twitter chat or a Facebook Live? Not every campaign will be appropriate for every platform, so focus on those where you’re more likely to reach and engage with your target audience to meet your campaign objectives.

Throughout the course of the live campaign, the Not My Style team identified influencers like bloggers, celebrities, and social media experts – and shamelessly sent emails, tweets, and other requests to share. It certainly helped – they managed to land a TV feature based on their social media activity – and endorsements via Twitter from the likes of Harry Potter actress Clemence Poesy.

Content Calendar

Once you’ve set goals, identified your audience, and chosen your channels, it’s time to create or integrate the campaign into your existing content calendar. Keep in mind the rule of thirds (self-promotion, engagement, and social listening) but also think about the user experience.

Whether it’s an advocacy or a fundraising campaign, no one wants to keep getting the ask – make sure you intersperse these with engaging content that adds value.

Reflect & Refresh

Always be iterating – it’s absolutely essential. Schedule times in advance to look at the progress of your campaign in line with your objectives, and be brutally honest with yourself. What is working? What isn’t? Things never run like clockwork, and you need to be flexible and change tack when it’s not going to plan.

Learnings & Insights

Whether you’ve achieved your goals for a campaign, it’s important to always learn something from them so you can plan more effectively for future campaigns. What types of content resonated with this audience? What time of the day did people engage with your content most? Did your audience engage more with posts written in question or statement-style form? No matter how small, you should learn something from each for the next campaign you do.

Find out more about how you can succeed on social with our fun and useful guides! Join the Lightful Community today for lots of useful goodies.